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“I hope it makes people think a bit,” Benjamin Britten wrote laconically to his sister Barbara while composing the War Requiem.

Commissioned to mark the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962, it certainly did make people think a bit: as a full-scale setting of the Latin mass for the dead ironically interspersed with marvellously inventive settings of First World War verse by Wilfred Owen (surprisingly, a poet little known or valued in the post-war era), it was both startlingly original in form and unabashedly polemical in intent.

Britten was a lifelong pacifist, and his music here has sharp edges of anger and horror as well as elegy and lament. But there is no note of vainglory: its focus is the cost in human suffering – “the pity of war” as Britten’s bleak epigraph to the score, the words of Owen himself, insists.

War Requiem immediately became enormously successful beyond the modern music coteries, circulated globally by a bestselling recording conducted by the composer. Later there would be a certain sceptical backlash – Stravinsky, for instance, admired a “very effective dramatic idea”, but disdained what he called a “cinemascope epic” idiom and “bounteous presence of literalisms”. Yet the work has more than retained its popularity over half a century, enhanced by several further recordings and Derek Jarman’s over-blown homoerotic film version. This year has seen a slew of performances in honour of the Armistice, and now it has reached the stage of English National Opera.

In that last word lies the rub: just how operatically should this oratorio be presented? Britten certainly conceived the work to be performed in a majestic setting that offered something more resonant (in both the physical and emotional sense) than a conventional concert hall, with the complex of forces involved laid out strategically for maximum dramatic and musical effect. The iconography of a cathedral and its rituals must have been in his mind too, as well as the clash between sacred Latin liturgy and Owen’s secular vernacular.

But Britten also surely wanted a certain amount left to the audience’s (the congregation’s?) imagination – this is a work intended to make us “think a bit”, and music and poetry rather than visual imagery are meant to do that job. It’s not as though he hasn’t given us plenty to chew on – some might even say that the piece is already too freighted with the aural equivalent of breast-beating and too ready to resort to cheaply illustrative clichés, such as the seraphic innocence of boys’ voices or the exotic clangour of bells, the poignancy of a lone flute, the rat-a-tat of the battlefield drum or the bragging of the military trumpet. Perhaps Stravinsky had a point, and alas, ENO’s ghastly production does nothing to refute it.

War Requiem performed by English National OperaCredit:
Alastair Muir

As animated by the director Daniel Kramer, the War Requiem becomes embarrassingly banal and gloopy. His interpretation, such as it is, has all the subtlety of a fifth-form school play and the acting throughout is dreadful. The chorus becomes a band of downtrodden proles, victims of war; they shuffle around looking anguished, collapse into a field of corpses, or stare out hopelessly into the auditorium. The tenor and baritone soloists are two plucky squaddies, and the soprano is an Angel of Death dressed in black doubling as a grieving mother. Tell us something we don’t know already!

Hopes ran high that the great photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, credited as designer, would provide material that would take us beyond the bleeding obvious, but no such luck. The most interesting idea he has had is to project pages from a German anti-war pamphlet of the Twenties over the Kyrie; after this, bar some pictures of street brawling and a postcard of Srebrenica, his choices are tastefully restrained to the point of irrelevance. A white chrysanthemum, detergent foam on the seashore, the bark of uprooted trees, a stormy sunset: what does any of this add to music that is already laying it on pretty thick?

Roderick Williams and David Butt Philip both sing beautifully, but Emma Bell sounds horribly uncomfortable in the soprano’s frenzied imprecations. Martyn Brabbins conducts with admirably taut discipline, and the chorus is nothing if not committed. But the concept is pure kitsch, and it does Britten no favours.